A #6M PEOPLE smuggling case collapsed after police posted a summons through the door of a Chinese restaurant the investigation had shut down.

Today The Western Mail can reveal that prosecutors behind a case which dramatically fell apart earlier this year because witnesses "disappeared" had only served a witness summons on one Chinese man. And that order was never opened because it was delivered to the empty Dragon Palace Restaurant in Aberystwyth.

The restaurant had closed because of people-smuggling allegations against the Chinese man and his uncle who ran the business and which formed the basis of the Swansea Crown Court trial.

The background to the expensive and ill-fated case, which left taxpayers with a #6.5m bill, emerged at Swansea Crown Court yesterday where illegal immigrant Wang Tong was jailed for a month for failing to attend the trial. It had been claimed Dragon Palace owner Guo Lon Chen, 32, and his nephew Xing Cheng, 21, were working "at the British end" for the vicious Snakehead people-smuggling organisation.

But the two were formally cleared of money laundering and assisting illegal immigration when the Swansea Crown Court case against them floundered in June after witnesses failed to appear.

In Tong's case, a police officer finally caught up with him in an Aberystwyth bookmakers just before the case started.

When Tong said he did not understand English the officer reached interpreter Alice Cheung, a West Wales restaurant owner, on his mobile phone and passed it to Tong.

Mrs Cheung said yesterday she was confident she explained to Tong in Mandarin that he would have to go to court to give evidence even though she accepted "he did not understand what Swansea meant". The witness summons was then posted through the restaurant door. Tong only surfaced on Tuesday when he was found selling pirate DVD copies of I, Robot and Catwoman.